Why the AfD’s win in Germany is a victory for Trump’s plan to destabilize Europe

Amid the flurry of messages that U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Sunday afternoon on his social media platform Truth Social, one item stood out among the memes, maps with the name of the State of New Mexico altered, and other provocations: a chart showing the near-final results of the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany. In that vote, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) made history with 43.8% of the vote, the strongest result for a far-right party in Germany since the end of World War II. Buoyed by social discontent and a struggling economy, it came close to an outright majority.

The fact that the leader of the world’s leading power is closely following election results in an eastern German state says much about the energy the MAGA movement has devoted, since its leader’s return to power, to advancing the far right in Europe. And especially to the fortunes of the AfD, whose victory on Sunday represents, for Trump and his allies, the payoff from a sustained effort to undermine the traditional politics of the Old Continent.

No one has invested more in that effort than Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who shattered the record for campaign spending by contributing more than $290 million to help return Trump to the White House in 2024. On Sunday, Musk celebrated the AfD’s victory with an enthusiastic “Well done!” on his own social media platform, X.

He was responding to a congratulatory message from Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader, to Saxony-Anhalt’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund. The victor, who borrowed heavily from the Trumpist playbook during his campaign, even adopting the slogan Make Germany Great Again, thanked the billionaire for his “support” and took the opportunity to suggest that the far-right party’s success would make Germany “a place worth investing in.”

The remark echoed a Musk post from December 2024 that marked his forceful entry into Germany’s election campaign. “Only AfD can save Germany,” he wrote. At the time, it was still a month before Trump’s return to power, and before Musk became, at least during the early months of the president’s second term, his closest ally in the White House. That intervention in the politics of a foreign country, one of Washington’s closest allies, foreshadowed what was to come.

In February 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance traveled to Munich to attend the Munich Security Conference. After delivering a combative speech that was widely seen in European capitals as an attack on the continent’s political establishment, Vance met with Alice Weidel, the leader of a party that was then still subject to a strict political cordon sanitaire in a country where the rise of the far right has revived the darkest memories of its Nazi past.

Hostility toward the EU

Months later, the publication of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, a document that sets Washington’s foreign policy priorities, confirmed the current administration’s hostility toward European governments. It painted a bleak picture of the European Union, pointing to its “economic decline” and the real “prospect of civilizational erasure” in “20 years or less” because of immigration and multiculturalism. When that happens, the document continued, it may no longer be clear that “certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies” of Washington. “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”

In doing so, the White House effectively embraced the narrative of European decline promoted by far-right parties across the continent, from Germany’s AfD to Spain’s Vox. The document also set out an unusual priority: supporting those movements and “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” from within. “America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism,” the strategy concluded. Reuters reported last week on a still-developing Trump administration plan to channel $4 million to far-right media outlets in Europe.

Trump’s unpopularity, along with decisions such as his unwavering support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the war against Iran, threats to annex Greenland, and attacks on both the Pope and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, have complicated that relationship in recent months. They have left many of these far-right parties in an awkward position, with the U.S. president increasingly viewed as a toxic political asset and no longer someone they are eager to be photographed alongside.

Both those far-right movements and Trump and his supporters — among them Richard Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, who celebrated Sunday’s results in Saxony-Anhalt as “a great victory and a new day” — “want Europe and America to be white, Christian, and sovereign,” writes Armida van Rij of the Carnegie Endowment. She also sees the European far-right ecosystem as a thread linking the MAGA movement to Russia through “a common objective: weakening the EU.” “The link-up with political MAGA was opportunistic,” she argues. “As soon as those ties became a liability rather than an asset, many moved on.”

The AfD’s victory is welcome news for that alignment after a difficult stretch marked by Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, despite Trump’s efforts to secure his victory, and the precipitous decline of Britain’s Nigel Farage, perhaps the foreign politician who has most assiduously cultivated ties to the MAGA world over the past 15 years.

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